Happiest Season
“Seeing a complex love story between two women onscreen—flawed though it may be—never stops feeling like a revelation.”
Title: Happiest Season (2020)
Director: Clea DuVall 👩🏼🇺🇸🌈
Writers: Clea DuVall 👩🏼🇺🇸🌈 and Mary Holland 👩🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Anni Glissman 👩🏼🇺🇸🌈
Technical: 4/5
We have ten minutes at the beginning of Hulu’s Happiest Season to fall for the film’s central couple Harper (Mackenzie Davis) and Abby (Kristen Stewart). And it’s easy to: They’re adorable touring Candy Cane Lane, holding hands as they look up at the lights and flirt. Abby hates Christmas but scrambles onto a stranger’s roof for a cute moment with Harper anyway—and promptly falls two stories onto an inflatable snowman when they’re discovered. But what are a few bruises when your hot girlfriend kisses you up against a wall in an alley and begs you to come home for Christmas to meet her family?
Unfortunately, those ten minutes are the only time we see why Harper and Abby’s relationship might be worth the chaos that follows. In the light of day, Harper seems less excited about her own extended invitation. She even offers her girlfriend an out from the trip, but instead Abby goes all-in and plans a surprise holiday proposal. It’s not until they’re almost to Harper’s family home that we find out why: Although she told Abby she’d come out to her parents and that they were supportive, Harper is actually still very much in the closet. In fact, she’s told everyone Abby is her orphaned roommate who has nowhere else to go for the holiday.
It’s as painful to watch as you might imagine. No one should be forced out of the closet before they’re safe and ready, but we’re still responsible for our actions and Harper spends the next 82 minutes of the film alternately abandoning Abby and gaslighting her for being upset.
It takes a lot to overcome an unlikeable main character but Happiest Season does thanks to its veteran actors and smart, heartfelt writing. It’s a joy to watch the cast breathe life into an otherwise straightforward coming-out story.
Mary Steenburgen’s matriarch Tipper rises above her WASP-y pretensions with a weird streak that simmers just beneath the surface. John, played perfectly by Dan Levy, might be relegated to the role of “gay best friend” in a lesser, straighter film. But here he is Abby’s chosen family, a nod to one of the most important tenets of queerness. Co-writer Mary Holland’s Jane is plucky and strange as the black sheep of the family but even as she provides comic relief she’s prescient and self-assured, a step ahead of her siblings and parents at every turn.
And Riley, the high-school ex Harper dumped and wrongly accused of harassment to avoid coming to terms with her sexuality, is the instant gay crush of the season thanks to Aubrey Plaza’s magnetism. Plaza has such chemistry with Stewart it’s easy to root for her to get the girl, even as Abby and Harper’s happy ending is assured by every rom-com convention.
Ultimately, Happiest Season fills a gap in the Christmas movie canon by telling a queer love story in its most human form: imperfect and messy, shaped by the world around it.
Gender: 4/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Happiest Season passes the Bechdel Test easily, but it still falls into some gender stereotypes. Harper plays the perfect femme daughter and isn’t allowed enough humanity throughout the film to make up for her bad behavior. Her entire relationship with her sister Sloane (Alison Brie) is predicated on their competition to be the reigning favorite daughter, and their parents fall into similar tropes: Tipper is obsessed with social status and Ted’s career ambitions take priority in his life. It’s only because of the humanity Steenburgen and Victor Garber infuse into their characters that they avoid becoming complete cliches.
Race: 2/5
The film occupies a narrow white, rich, and vaguely Protestant world immediately recognizable to anyone who’s lived or stepped into it. And it does so to the exclusion of everyone else.
The only racial diversity comes from supporting characters who aren’t given much room for personality or impact. Sloane’s husband Eric, played by Burl Moseley, is Black and while he doesn’t fall into any offensive stereotypes, he’s also given little in the way of screentime. In the case of Plaza, her real-life Puerto Rican heritage is never mentioned, effectively whitewashing her character. This omission might not feel problematic if Happiest Season didn’t adopt the same practice for all its characters—watching the film, you’d think the concept of race doesn’t exist at all. It does manage to feature a handful of characters of color in small roles, but true to the worst of the WASP-y world it portrays, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear a tipsy middle-aged white woman bragging that she doesn’t “see color” here.
It’s likely Happiest Season fumbles its handling of race because it lacks diversity behind the camera as well. Writer/director Clea Duvall and co-writer Mary Holland are both white, and it shows. It’s frustrating to see once again just who’s funded to tell stories that break free of the mainstream, and who is not.
Bonus for LGBTQ: +1.00
Seeing a complex love story between two women onscreen—flawed though it may be—never stops feeling like a revelation, and for this Happiest Season is a gift. Like any space historically reserved for someone else, it’s often not until we see ourselves reflected that we realize how much we missed that representation all along.
The moments that make a relationship aren’t end-frame kisses and romantic declarations, and unlike many other movies Happiest Season gets the little things right. While Mackenzie Davis does not identify as a lesbian, which has frustrated many people, other key players like Duvall, Stewart, Plaza, and Levy all belong to the LGBTQ community themselves. It’s likely because of this that Happiest Season nails much of the queer experience that’s hard to put into words: how walking into a gay bar and being surrounded by other queers can be a weight off your shoulders. How different that feels when walking into a bar like the aptly-named Fratty’s, which holds a mirror up to your own otherness—and, depending on who you are, which can even threaten your physical safety.
It’s that same othering and potential violence that’s led to the creation of inclusive traditions like drag, so it feels fitting that one of the best scenes in the film comes when Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme lead a dirty Christmas sing-a-long. In addition to paying homage to another important part of the LGBTQ community, the scene balances Happiest Season’s heavy themes with some much-needed levity and cements the movie’s place as a holiday classic.
The film’s handling of LGBTQ storylines isn’t without its pitfalls though. At the end of the day, Happiest Season is still a movie made to appeal to mainstream and (presumed) straight audiences. And what could be more standard than a coming-out story? Because the film takes place within Tipper and Ted’s conservative circle, being gay comes across as something to be ashamed of—so much so that Harper asks Abby not to reveal her own sexuality to the family, effectively forcing her girlfriend back into the closet. This framing of queerness as an outlier diverging from the straight “norm” feels isolating at times.
It’s Levy who manages to pull the coming-out plotline back from pandering to empathetic. Following Abby outside after Harper denies their relationship in front of her entire family, John shares his own experience of coming out and says: “...a chapter has ended and a new one’s begun. And you have to be ready for that. You can’t do it for anyone else.”
Happiest Season tells that first chapter well. Hopefully its success paves the way for future films to tackle all the queer stories that come next—the ones that aren’t centered around straightness.
Mediaversity Grade: B- 3.67/5
Overall, the film suffers most from the responsibility it bears. Sure, it’s important to call out its weaknesses. Harper owes Abby (and Riley) more, and the movie never truly reckons with the harm she caused. But it’s equally important to remember that as long as one film is expected to be all things to a community, it will never have the freedom to focus on telling a good story. Happiest Season shines because of how sweet, funny, and relatable it is—and because it feels so good to see queer characters finally take center stage.
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